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from Open Door Coffee Co.; Hudson, OH; Oct. 26, 2016

Friday, December 19, 2014

Frankenstein Sundae, 82

There’s a coda here. I had originally printed out
all—well, most, it seems—of my
correspondence with Betty, filing it all with my Mary Shelley things, knowing
I’d probably need to refer to it now and then as I was writing and revising my
biography. But then I went back to teach at WRA; I started working on Edgar
Poe; I wrote to Betty only rarely; I forgot about that thick file.

Until I started working on this memoir. Going through
my folders, I found it, was dazzled by its dimensions. But what to do with it?

In late October 2011 I found out that Betty’s papers
were being handled by the outstanding Shelley scholar Charles Robinson—her dear
friend on the faculty of the University of Delaware. I emailed him and told him
what I had, and he thought it would be a good thing to add to her papers, which
he was collecting for the Bennett archive—though its location, at the time, was
uncertain. He told me there had been an auction of some of her collection—but
many things had not sold.

On October 29, I drove to a nearby OfficeMax and photocopied
the entire set of email exchanges (bought a thick notebook, as well, to stuff
it all into); on Halloween—how fitting!—I mailed it all to Robinson in Delaware
(saving a copy for myself, of course).

He and I exchanged a few more emails on the subject,
and he sent me the texts of the remarks he’d made at her memorial service at American
University on September 16, 2006, and of his tribute published in the Keats-Shelley Journal (an annual) in
2007. Everything he said about her resonated most profoundly with me. (I also
learned from those remarks that her library had gone to the Byron Society
Library at Drew University—not sure if our correspondence was among those items.)

After I read his wonderful tributes, I sent this note
to him (excerpted):

I just finished
those extraordinarily moving tributes to Betty—and I was not at all surprised
to learn that she was as generous with others as she was with me (as the
correspondence you’ll soon see reveals). I remember being so stunned that
she would write to me—a middle school
teacher (at the time) who knew, initially, so little about MWS et al. that it was,
well, probably laughable. She didn’t laugh. She guided me all the
way, shared things with me that I know
she was planning to publish one day herself ... for me, she was a model of what
a true scholar is. I come from an academic family (both parents were
profs; both brothers, too, for a while), so I know how rare was her behavior in
the groves of you-know-where.

I wish, as I’ve said, that I’d been a better friend to
Betty in her final struggle. Although I am not part of her family, was not part
of her inner circle of friends and colleagues, had met her only once, I know
there was both a scholarly and a personal intimacy in our correspondence.

As I also said, when I was working on this (far too
long) chapter, I intentionally did not “read ahead” in the correspondence. I
wanted to reconstruct, insofar as such is possible, the novelty—and the excitement—of
it all.

And, doing so, I rediscovered the wonders of Betty
Bennett—and felt overwhelming gratitude for her generosity and kindness. They have
been among the great gifts of my life.